Abigail Thernstrom

In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.

Every American can make their own judgment about whether justice was served by the verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial but one thing we should all recognize: President Obama’s interference in a local law enforcement matter was unprecedented and inappropriate, and he comes away from the case looking badly tarnished by his poor judgment.

This book is a wonderful spin-off from Thomas Sowell’s magnificent 2009 volume Intellectuals and Society. His main message – amply illustrated – is that, on the subject of race, intellectuals are useless.

After Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953, it was no surprise that the adoptive parents of their two sons chose to send the orphaned brothers to the Little Red School House, a New York private school.

The lawyers have spoken; it is now the Court’s turn. What is it likely to say when the decision is finally announced? The oral argument did shed some light on the likely answer – although reading judicial tea leaves is always hazardous.

Cynthia Tucker, in her confessional editorial in the South’s premier newspaper, was too hard on herself. She had long supported race-conscious districting, but her erstwhile convictions had been those of the entire civil rights community and of elected officials across the political spectrum who saw such districting as one litmus test of a commitment to racial equality.